We all stared at the page and its meaningless words, until Trent suddenly picked up the journal and started turning it over in his hands.
“You know, when the police first asked me to look over the antiques they found in that coffin you guys dug up, I didn’t get to take a very close look at them. I was mostly focused on the most obvious details, but now that I’ve gotten a closer look at the journal, I realize that the binding is off.”
“Off?” Magnus questioned. He moved like he was going to take the journal from Trent and look for himself, but then changed his mind. “What do you mean,off.”
“Its hard to explain without going into a detailed lectured about how old books were bound, but the leather on the spine looks thicker than the rest of it. It should all be one piece of leather, and the spine usually gets stretched the most, so that shouldn’t be the case.”
Magnus, Brody, and I shared a look, and we all seemed to come to the same conclusion at the exact same time. Without a word, Magnus took the journal from Trent and handed it over to Brody, who pulled out a knife and used it to split open the journal’s leather binding.
Hidden within the spine of the book, we found three long, thin strips of leather. Each was printed with a series of random numbers, along with an engraving of a specific flower at the top.
Three strips of leather, each labeled with either a rose, a poppy, or a Lisianthus flower. It was clear that each one coordinated to one of the Milford sisters, but the numbers made no sense. Even when I tried using the code that Lisianthus had used for the rest of her journal, it was still meaningless.
“So, that’s one more key to the puzzle,” Ellis said as he examined one of the leather strips. “But what does this tell us?”
“Nothing,” I said as I threw one of the other leather strips onto the table. “This tells us nothing. These sisters are driving me up the wall with their constant codes and puzzles. I’m starting to think they’re doing it just to be annoying.”
Kayden picked up the leather strip I’d just throw down. “Maybe not. Like you said, the sisters were interested in codes and stuff like that. I think... these leather strips might be a scytale.”
He said it with such certainty, but I’d never heard that word before, and judging from the looks on everyone else’s faces, neither had they.
“What’s a scytale?”
“It’s a method the ancient Greeks used to send coded messages,” Kayden said, as though that should explain things.
We were all still just as lost.
With a sigh, Kayden picked up the wooden dowel. “Here. I’ll show you. The message is printed out on a strip of leather, interspersed with other random letters, or in this case, numbers, to hide it. There’s no way of knowing which numbers are part of the message, and which are meaningless, until you wrap it around a specifically sized dowel. Then, the numbers should line up.”
As he spoke, he wrapped the leather strip around the dowel, keeping each new loop snuggly pressed against the one before it. In most places the numbers didn’t line up, except for one specific place on the dowel where everything lined up perfectly. Assuming he was right, then the dozens of random numbers was actually a very specific string of eighteen numbers.
After doing this with all three pieces of leather, we started to see a pattern emerge. The numbers at the end of each series were almost the same, and after some debate, we realized these must be dates. They were the same year, near the beginning of the twentieth century, and no more than two months apart.
Right around the time when the Milford sisters had come to Emberwood.
My hand flew across a scrap piece of paper as I wrote the numbers down. “If we take out the dates, then we’re left with twelve numbers.”
“No,” Brody disagreed as he pointed to a specific spot on one of the leather strips. “Twelve numbers and two decimals. See this spot here. It just looks like an imperfection of the leather, but it’s too symmetrical. It must be intentional.”
One could always trust Brody’s sniper eyes to see what everyone else overlooked.
Adding the decimals to the string of numbers, I leaned back in my chair and looked at what I’d written down.
The answer was so obvious, I felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.
“It’s latitude and longitude. These are records of an exact location and date.”
Of course, our next step was to then look up those three locations.
At first, there was nothing special about those three locations, other than fact that they were all relatively nearby. We could have driven to any of them in just a few hours.
However, when we cross-referenced the locations with the dates listed as well, something surprising turned up.
“There used to be an orphanage at each of these locations,” Magnus announced. “They’re all gone now, but at the beginningof the century, each location was a sanctuary for orphan children.”
Holding up his phone, he showed us an old black and white photo of a modest wooden building. Even in the picture, there was an eclectic mix of children sitting on the steps.
The answer was clear. No one needed to say it out loud as we looked at the picture. These orphanages were where the Milford sisters had dropped off their children before eventually making their way to Emberwood.